Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada.
School of Computing, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada.
J Neuroeng Rehabil. 2022 Jul 26;19(1):82. doi: 10.1186/s12984-022-01035-1.
An individual's rapid motor skills allow them to perform many daily activities and are a hallmark of physical health. Although age and sex are both known to affect motor performance, standardized methods for assessing their impact on upper limb function are limited.
Here we perform a cross-sectional study of 643 healthy human participants in two interactive motor tasks developed to quantify sensorimotor abilities, Object-Hit (OH) and Object-Hit-and-Avoid (OHA). The tasks required participants to hit virtual objects with and without the presence of distractor objects. Velocities and positions of hands and objects were recorded by a robotic exoskeleton, allowing a variety of parameters to be calculated for each trial. We verified that these tasks are viable for measuring performance in healthy humans and we examined whether any of our recorded parameters were related to age or sex.
Our analysis shows that both OH and OHA can assess rapid motor behaviours in healthy human participants. It also shows that while some parameters in these tasks decline with age, those most associated with the motor system do not. Three parameters show significant sex-related effects in OH, but these effects disappear in OHA.
This study suggests that the underlying effect of aging on rapid motor behaviours is not on the capabilities of the motor system, but on the brain's capacity for processing inputs into motor actions. Additionally, this study provides a baseline description of healthy human performance in OH and OHA when using these tasks to investigate age-related declines in sensorimotor ability.
个体的快速运动技能使他们能够完成许多日常活动，是身体健康的标志。尽管年龄和性别都已知会影响运动表现，但评估它们对上肢功能影响的标准化方法有限。
在这里，我们对 643 名健康人类参与者进行了一项横断面研究，这些参与者参与了两项旨在量化感觉运动能力的交互运动任务，即物体击打（OH）和物体击打与回避（OHA）。这些任务要求参与者用和不用干扰物体击打虚拟物体。手和物体的速度和位置由机器人外骨骼记录，允许为每个试验计算各种参数。我们验证了这些任务可用于测量健康人类的表现，并且检查了我们记录的任何参数是否与年龄或性别有关。
我们的分析表明，OH 和 OHA 均可评估健康人类参与者的快速运动行为。它还表明，虽然这些任务中的一些参数随年龄增长而下降，但与运动系统最相关的参数并未下降。OH 中的三个参数显示出与性别相关的显著影响，但在 OHA 中这些影响消失了。
这项研究表明，衰老对快速运动行为的潜在影响不是运动系统的能力，而是大脑对运动动作输入进行处理的能力。此外，当使用这些任务来研究与年龄相关的感觉运动能力下降时，本研究提供了 OH 和 OHA 中健康人类表现的基线描述。
